Entertainment devices, such as televisions, television receivers (e.g., set-top boxes) and media servers have become very complicated, supporting a wide variety of feature sets. Simple remote controls with a number pad and a handful of assorted feature buttons (e.g., volume changes, channel changes, power and mute) are no longer adequate to support the enhanced feature sets available on many entertainment devices. To allow user navigation of newer feature sets on entertainment devices, advanced remote controls have been developed that provide various techniques for users to input information to the entertainment device. For example, some remote controls include touch pads or other positional input devices allowing a user to control a cursor presented on screen by an entertainment device.
Touch pads are not only very easy to master but, unlike standard keypads, touch pads may be used to dynamically assign functions to specific input means. By allowing multiple and dynamic assignment of input areas of the touchpad, navigation though nested menus is possible. Of course, the user must be aware of how parts of the touchpad are assigned.
Among touchpad remote controls, there are two schools currently extant. A first school includes remote controls having a touch pad that has no display. A user will interact with the touch pad but will receive position indicia on the screen of the television or television monitor. Thus, the user will typically see an interactive menu on the television screen that includes a cursor indicative of a position. Dragging a finger across the touchpad will move the cursor in a corresponding direction across the menu. An example of such first school remote with a touchpad is set forth in US Published Application 2006/0119585. Such systems do not include on-remote visual cues as to position and thus tend to allow a user to mistakenly activate sections of the touch screen. As a result, the user interface menus tend to be successful when fewer selections are included.
A second school includes remotes having a touchpad with elaborate displays behind them. The Sony Integrated Remote Commander Series (e.g. RM-AV3000, RM-NX7000) includes remote controls from the second school. Elaborate LCD displays behind the touchpad allow for control by positioning images immediately behind a segment of the touchpad corresponding thereto. Such a system is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 7,174,518. The shortfall of the LCD display based touchpad is that it tends to be fragile, expensive, and its full capabilities are generally not well exploited in performing many of the tasks typical of most remote controls. A user is, generally, not tolerant of elaborate menus that might fully exploit the capabilities of an LCD display; nor is the touchpad, itself, capable of such specific location of a cursor in elaborate menus.
What is needed in the art is a display behind a touch pad that can be economically manufactured to exploit the touch pad in a remote.